What caused the political crises of the 1670s and 1680s in England? From one perspective, these crises were caused by resurgent Counter-Reformation Catholicism, as embodied in the political and military agendas of Louis XIV, Charles II, and James II. Repeated acts of aggression by Catholic or crypto-Catholic rulers led English Protestants to fear that their embattled faith was about to be overwhelmed by what they called “popery.” Along with popery came high-handed government, as the English royal brothers sought to expand their powers at the expense of parliament. The result was a series of political crises, from the parliamentary outcry in 1673 over Charles II's Declaration of Indulgence, to the Restoration crisis of 1678–83, to the Revolution of 1688–89. This problem of “popery and arbitrary government” was resolved in 1689 when resurgent Catholicism was rebuffed, a Protestant king and queen were installed on the thrones of England and Scotland, and England went to war with France. This interpretation of the 1670s and 1680s is associated especially with the work of Jonathan Scott, who has provided several authoritative investigations of the period.Footnote 1
It would be equally possible to argue, however, that the political crises of the 1670s and 1680s were caused not by “popery” but by its opposite, anti-popery. Prognostications of doom by anti-popish politicians fed the fears of English Protestants that their embattled faith was about to be overwhelmed. The royal brothers, Charles and James, reacted to ascendant anti-popery with alarm, seeking to repel anti-popish politicians and anti-popish narratives. In so doing they chose to exercise their prerogative powers in ways that could easily be seen as arbitrary. The prolonged crisis could be resolved only if resurgent anti-popery was rebuffed, anti-popish politicians were discredited, and Catholicism was no longer seen as a threat to the survival of Protestantism in England. The problem to be solved, in this view, was one of English perceptions rather than English realities. This interpretation has not been described extensively in modern scholarship but is based on claims advanced at the time that will be explored more fully in this article. Many people in later Restoration England saw anti-popery as a leading threat to political stability. The solution to this problem, in their view, was something that we might call anti-anti-popery, a critique of anti-popery that was designed to lay the troubles of the Restoration to rest by countering their perceived root cause.
Historians, not least Jonathan Scott, have recognized that different diagnoses of the ills of England drove different phases of the crisis of the 1670s and 1680s. Thus the fears of “popery and arbitrary government” of the late 1670s were replaced by the fears of popular disorder that drove the so-called Tory Reaction of the early 1680s. The Tory Reaction was then followed by rising popular fears of popery and arbitrary government under James II in the later 1680s, which in turn drove the Revolution of 1688–89. Despite the broad recognition of these different phases in the troubled history of later Stuart England, historians have tended to see both sides in the national debate, the Whig and the Tory parties, as reliant on a shared anti-popery. This is what enabled the two sides to come together to obstruct James II in 1688. Most historians of later Stuart religion and politics have focused on Tory adaptation to anti-popery rather than any outright opposition to anti-popery. Tory polemicists may have opposed some of the anti-popish narratives advanced by Whigs, but they developed their own brand of anti-popery to supplant it, historians have observed. Tim Harris described this phenomenon as “the tory exploitation of fears of tyranny and popery.” Both Scott and Harris have investigated the ways in which Tories or loyalists turned anti-popery against Whigs and religious nonconformists by accusing them of being in league with papists.Footnote 2
The scholarly focus on Whig and Tory anti-popery has tended to obscure the expression of opinions critical of anti-popery by members of both parties.Footnote 3 Charting these critiques of anti-popery from the beginning of the 1670s to the end of the 1680s enables us to see how popular and widespread the critiques were and how much influence they had, first within the Tory party and later in an offshoot of the Whig party. Opposition to anti-popery was in many ways less sensational than anti-popery itself; it did not result in any revolutions, and it manifested itself in rhetoric that was often less bellicose. It is easily dismissed as a kind of crypto-Catholicism, although it is important to note that anti-anti-popery was not at all the same thing as pro-popery. Opposition to anti-popery cannot easily be seen as a coherent ideology, in part because many of the writers who deployed anti-anti-popish rhetoric also deployed anti-popish rhetoric at other points in their careers. Its existence, however attenuated and provisional it may have been, helps to illuminate the nature of anti-popery itself. If anti-popery could be explicitly rejected and opposed, then it was not a fixed attribute that invariably dictated behavior; rather, it seems to have been a polemical strategy that was used by certain English Protestants in pursuit of a given set of ends. As a polemical strategy, it could be both adopted and discarded.
Later Stuart anti-popery, as several historians have observed, was not the same thing as opposition to Catholic belief.Footnote 4 While anti-Catholicism might be defined as an opposition to the Catholic faith, anti-popery was an opposition to a stereotyped image of Catholicism. As Peter Lake put it, popery was an “anti-religion,” or a negative image used by Protestants to define their own self-image.Footnote 5 This anti-religion had only a tangential relationship to actual Catholic belief and practice. In seventeenth-century England the Protestant concept of “popery” typically included the beliefs that many Catholics were engaged in a conspiracy to overthrow Protestantism, that Catholics might feel free to tell lies in furtherance of this conspiracy, and that Catholics might not feel bound to obey Protestant rulers.Footnote 6 Anti-popish English authors tended to present some Catholics as more deeply embedded in the conspiracy than others; thus Jesuits, typically, were placed at the core of the conspiracy, while some of the Catholic laity were deemed to be relatively innocent of it. Meanwhile, both Tory and Whig authors might seek to turn anti-popery against their opponents by accusing members of the other party of collaborating with the popish conspiracy.Footnote 7 Despite this distinction between anti-popery and anti-Catholicism, it remains the case that anti-popish fears were frequently directed at Catholics. Even the Catholic laity suffered from a residual suspicion among many Protestants that they might be participants in the popish plot. This sort of prejudice did tremendous harm to Catholics by underpinning the discriminatory legislation of the later Stuart period, including the Test Act of 1673, which excluded Catholics from public office; the Test Act of 1678, which excluded Catholics from parliament; and the Popery Act of 1700, which barred Catholics from purchasing land.Footnote 8
Opponents of anti-popery developed a broad critique of both anti-Catholicism and anti-popery. Like many English Protestants, they were willing to see the good in many Catholics. They went further, however, in critiquing the widely expressed anxieties about the political influence of popery. The manipulation of these anxieties, critics of anti-popery contended, could lead to civil war if anti-popish rhetoric was not countered by collective action. Writers and thinkers who sought to counter anti-popery were not themselves sympathetic to popery; indeed, it is unlikely that anyone would defend “popery,” given that the term was so laden with opprobrium. Rather, these writers criticized the divisive, destabilizing effects of anti-popery.
As Anthony Milton has shown, critiques of anti-popery reached a high-water mark in the late 1620s and 1630s, when Laudians opposed the vehement anti-popery of the Puritans.Footnote 9 The reappearance of such critiques in the later Stuart period has not been analyzed as extensively, despite ample evidence from contemporary sources that these critiques were expressed even more urgently after the Civil War than before. Historians have occasionally investigated Tory critiques of particular anti-popish narratives at the time of the Popish Plot crisis in the late 1670s, but no historian has investigated the rise of critiques of anti-popery among certain Whigs in the late 1680s.Footnote 10 Later Stuart critiques of anti-popery were invested with greater power than the earlier examples because anti-popery had proved to be more disruptive than the Laudians could ever have imagined. It was possible for authors to attribute the chaos of the 1640s to the disruptive power of anti-popery, and many chose to do so.
Anti-popery was a polemical weapon. It had been developed by the Puritans and honed by the Whigs; the opponents of these groups, whether Laudians or Tories, had to neutralize this weapon by either opposing it or adapting it for their own ends. At the time of the Popish Plot, and later during the unsettled reign of James II, Tory writers often accused their Whig opponents of using anti-popery to promote themselves, of being seditious under the guise of being zealous, and of inventing popish plots to serve the interests of their faction. Whig authors often accused their opponents of failing to appreciate the popish threat and thereby falling in league with that threat.
In the 1670s, Andrew Marvell's well-known Account of the growth of popery, and arbitrary government in England was countered by Roger L’Estrange's debunking Account of the growth of knavery under the pretended fears of arbitrary government and popery.Footnote 11 The former was a classic anti-popish tract; the latter was a key anti-anti-popish tract. Only the first is cited regularly by historians, while the counterargument remains little known.Footnote 12 Both tracts gained their potency from their usefulness in framing definitions of the collective self. As Peter Lake has observed, for anti-popish writers, “popery worked as a unifying ‘other’, an inherently un-English or alien force.”Footnote 13 For writers who opposed anti-popery, it was anti-popery itself that became a defining characteristic of the unifying “other.” After the furor over the so-called Popish Plot began, L’Estrange described “a sort of men, that under the Countenance of This Plot advance another of their own, and ’tis but the Rubbing of a Libel with a little Anti-Popery, to give it the Popular smack.” By warning his readers against a “sort of men” who used “Anti-Popery” as camouflage for libeling and plotting, L’Estrange was describing his opponents as a rebellious faction against which his loyalist readers ought to define themselves.Footnote 14 As he had mused in a letter two years earlier, “perhaps the danger of Popery it selfe is not much greater, then the danger of possessing the people w[i]th an apprehension that they are in danger of it.”Footnote 15
And yet L’Estrange was not averse to using the language of anti-popery himself when it suited his cause.Footnote 16 During the heated political debates regarding the Popish Plot, the same controversialists could be found deploying the rhetoric of anti-popery and the rhetoric of anti-anti-popery at different moments. In the conceptual toolkits of these authors, the two devices lay side by side. Anti-anti-popery was as much the companion of anti-popery as it was its opposite. It was just as variable as anti-popery, and in the hands of different thinkers it could be used in different ways.
Some of this variability can be explained by the shifting winds of political patronage. The development of opposition to anti-popery in England was spurred by James Stuart, first as duke of York and later as King James II, who took the position articulated at times by L’Estrange that the destabilizing populism of anti-popery was at the root of England's troubles. He urged his friends not to focus on “the imaginary dangers of Popery,” noting that the number of Catholics in England was too small to pose any real threat to the Church of England. In March 1686 he issued directions to the preachers of the Church of England commanding them to steer clear of controversial matters, including critiques of popery.Footnote 17 He showed no desire to bow to anti-popery; instead, he was determined to attack it head on. He has been criticized by historians for his provocative measures, but the skeptical assessments of the king's policies have tended to assume, perhaps falsely, that his measures had little popular support because of the broad influence of anti-popery in the general population. If there was in fact a popular critique of anti-popery in Restoration England, then the king's reign looks quite different in retrospect. The crisis that preceded the Revolution of 1688–89, in this reading, was driven not only by a conflict between “popery” and anti-popery but also by a conflict between anti-popery and anti-anti-popery, as rival interpretations of the nature of England's troubles clashed more furiously than ever before.Footnote 18
I
James II's accession in February 1685 brought with it a spate of patriotic unity, but it was a spurious unity overlying deep divisions. In the early days of the new reign, most Englishmen and Englishwomen celebrated the accession, while the discontented kept close counsel. The bishop of Carlisle urged the Westmorland gentleman Sir Daniel Fleming to seek election to parliament, exhorting him privately that “all true sons of the Church of England were bound in Conscience to help now to defend her, when she was very likely to be in great danger.” Brian Fairfax, the equerry to the king, resigned his position, surmising that he had been treated coldly upon the accession because he was a “free speaker in all company against idolatrous Popery.”Footnote 19 But Fairfax's resignation was unusual, and most of the deceased king's former officers remained in service. The precarious unity of the early months of the reign continued to hold during Monmouth's Rebellion, an uprising that was swiftly defeated. It was strained by a rancorous session of parliament in the autumn when a majority in the Commons voiced opposition to the king's employment of Catholic officers in the army raised to defeat the rebels. When the king responded by promoting more Catholics at court and in the armed forces, his kingdom divided as different camps responded to his policies in different ways. Some prominent Anglicans and Protestant nonconformists expressed their discontent and eventually joined the Glorious Revolution. Others were inclined to support the royal policies, especially when James announced his plan to secure religious toleration for Protestant nonconformists as well as for Catholics.Footnote 20
These differing responses fractured many of the religious and political groups in England, revealing preexisting fissures within them. Anglicans, who made up at least 90 percent of the English population, were not united in their responses to James II's policies. Many took the position articulated by Sir Willoughby Aston in 1685: “I had often sayd [sic] that I feared either Popery would bring in Presbytery, or Presbytery, would bring in Popery … and that the Church of England was the only bulwark against both.” Anglicans like Sir Willoughby saw separate threats coming from popery, by which he meant Catholicism, and presbytery, by which he meant Presbyterianism or nonconformity.Footnote 21 Other Anglicans discounted the popish threat while highlighting the dissenting, or “fanatic,” threat. As the bishop of Peterborough declared to Roger Morrice in 1687, “there is no danger at all of Popery, but only of the Fanaticks and therefore it concernes them [the Anglicans] to make themselves as strong as they can against them.”Footnote 22 A third group saw popery as the real danger and attacks on dissenting groups as a divisive distraction. The House of Commons took this position in 1681, resolving that “the Prosecution of Protestant Dissenters upon the Penal Laws is at this Time grievous to the Subject, a Weakening of the Protestant Interest, an Encouragement to Popery.”Footnote 23
The Anglicans who felt most threatened by Catholicism behaved differently under James II than did those who felt most threatened by Protestant nonconformity. Those in the latter camp tended to see anti-popery as a tool of the refractory nonconformists, and the use of this tool often suggested to them an unwillingness to trust a Catholic king.Footnote 24 Although they might occasionally make anti-popish comments, this was not their more common rhetorical stance during the reign of James II. The so-called latitudinarian ministers, by contrast, led an onslaught on “popery” in their sermons and pamphlets in the early years of James II's reign. Although they had criticized dissenters during the reign of Charles II, they drew back from such criticisms after 1685, when the danger posed by resurgent Catholicism seemed more extreme.Footnote 25
The dissenters themselves were also divided, both confessionally and in their modes of self-definition. The dissenting groups included the Presbyterians, Congregationalists (also known as Independents), Baptists, and Quakers. Many dissenters were both anti-popish and anti-clerical, attacking the Church of England for its vestiges of “popish” rituals. This form of anti-popery was common among Presbyterians and some Congregationalists, the heirs to the Puritan tradition in Restoration England.Footnote 26 Other dissenters were anti-clerical to such a degree that they saw Anglican persecution as the main problem in England, and, when Catholics disavowed persecution, they were accepted as allies. Quakers, for instance, opposed Catholicism when it countenanced persecution, but their writings lacked the full panoply of anti-popish rhetoric. The main distinction drawn in Quaker writings was not between Protestants and Catholics but between the “persecutors” and those who “had a tenderness.” Quakers jealously policed their use of language to keep out alternative modes of dividing the world, going so far as to prohibit the words “Whig” and “Tory” in conversation. When James worked to free Quakers from prison, first as duke of York and later as king, he attracted the friendship of leading Quakers such as William Penn, George Whitehead, and Robert Barclay, who praised him for his willingness to support freedom of conscience.Footnote 27 Some dissenters developed a critique of anti-popery after the king issued his Declaration for liberty of conscience in 1687. By opposing anti-popery, they sought to defend the king's campaign for toleration against the anti-popish attacks that threatened to derail it.
These fractures among English Protestants, combined with easy access to the printing press, resulted in a cacophony of polemics. Just as anti-popery came in different guises, articulated variously as an attack on the political power of Catholics, an attack on surviving elements of Catholicism in the Anglican liturgy, or an attack on persecution, so too opposition to anti-popery came in different forms. Opposition to anti-popery could be used by Anglicans as a means of criticizing the influence of “factious” dissenters, or by dissenters as a means of forming an alliance with a Catholic king, or by Catholics as a means of defending their own group.Footnote 28 Each form of opposition to anti-popery envisioned an “other” against which it defined itself, whether that “other” was factious dissenters who were attempting to revive the spirit of 1641, or Anglican “persecutors,” or a more vaguely defined group of “blind zealots.”Footnote 29
Despite this complexity, Protestant opposition to anti-popery during James II's reign can be reduced to two main types: one that was articulated by Anglican Tories who supported the king's policies because they believed it was their duty to do so, and another that was articulated by dissenters and Whigs who supported those policies because they believed it was in their interest to do so. The first type was a new variant on an older genre of opposition to anti-popery, expressed with greater intensity now that the king himself was leading the attacks. The second type was more innovative; it represented an abandonment by certain Whig authors of their prior positions. The two types of rhetoric, Tory and Whig, used similar methods for different ends. Both used the words “fears and jealousies” to refer to anti-popery. Both were torn by competing impulses: the desire to extinguish “fears and jealousies” altogether, thereby ensuring peace and prosperity for the kingdom, and the desire to retarget the “fears and jealousies” of the populace onto their enemies. The Tory instinct was often to reorient public fears away from the king and Catholicism and toward rebellion and nonconformity. The Whig writers who opposed anti-popery often sought to vilify the Anglican “persecutors” who were said to be fomenting these fears of popery.
The phrase “fears and jealousies” was not a new coinage. It appeared regularly in pre–Civil War polemic and gained greater currency in the early 1670s when it was commonly applied to fears about popery. In 1672, Samuel Parker, the future bishop of Oxford, issued a work titled A preface shewing what grounds there are of fears and jealousies of popery, in which he argued that grounds for those fears were lacking. This provoked a furious debate with Andrew Marvell, who responded in the same year with his Rehearsal transpros’d, or, animadversions upon a late book intituled, A preface, shewing what grounds there are of fears and jealousies of popery. Parker and Marvell continued the debate with further salvos, thereby bringing greater attention to the “fears and jealousies” of popery.Footnote 30 Over the course of the 1670s and 1680s, “fears and jealousies” became a common meme: a quick handle by which an author could refer to the concept of “anti-popery” in an era when the term itself was not in common use. Although Roger L’Estrange used the term “anti-popery” at least once, in 1679, even he tended to rely on the phrase “fears and jealousies,” presumably because of its greater currency.Footnote 31
The expression had a disparaging bite to it. References to “fears and jealousies” tended to be counterpoised against more positive and desirable qualities, such as “peace and quiet,” as in the preamble to the order of the Privy Council of Scotland to the borough of Dumfries on 26 December 1688: “His Majestie's Privy Council understanding that, in the late nominatione of magistrats and counsell for your brugh, Papists have been imployed in offices of power and trust among you, which may occasion fears and jealousies, to the indangering of the peace and quiet.”Footnote 32 The expression also suggested the possibility of imminent social unrest. One pamphleteer, writing in 1681, argued, “The fears and jealousies of Popery, as well then [during the Civil War], as now, was the Stock on which the Ambitious, the Covetous, and the Revengeful grafted all their Treasonable designs.”Footnote 33
By employing the phrase “fears and jealousies,” a writer or speaker could reframe the issues surrounding anti-popery. In this new diagnosis, the problem to be solved was no longer popery but fears of popery. As one critic of anti-popery wrote in 1688, striking a theme that would recur in modern times, “We have now nothing to Fear, but the Dismal Effects of Popular Fears.”Footnote 34 Mitigating those fears might involve countering popular anxieties rather than restricting the political activities of Catholics. The Whig journalist Henry Care, a supporter of James II's religious policies, took this line of argument in April 1688: “Who cries out popery and arbitrary government, now, Gentlemen? … Who are they that repine and mutter, and would be clapping Dutch Spectacles on People's Noses, (tinctur’d with Fears and Jealousies,) to represent all Actions of the Government in false Colours, and frightful Shapes?”Footnote 35 In this metaphor, anti-popery was depicted as a pair of tinted lenses that colored the perceptions of those who wore them. Care's description of these spectacles as “Dutch” in design was a reference to the pamphlets, many with anti-popish themes, printed in Holland and smuggled into England in 1688. The Dutch agenda, according to Care, was to alienate Englishmen and Englishwomen from their government by deploying anti-popish “Fears and Jealousies.”Footnote 36
In Care's understanding of contemporary political discourse, anti-popery acted like a lens that influenced people's interpretations of events. If the lens were to be removed, he hoped, then people would cease to see the “Actions of the Government” in “frightful Shapes,” but instead would see them as they really were. His goal was to counter popular fears by encouraging his readers to support a general liberty of conscience, which would diminish any worries that one religion could dominate all the others. Misperceptions of Catholics would vanish. As he put it in another tract, a general liberty of conscience would eliminate the “Fears and Jealousies” of “All Parties.”Footnote 37
Tory critics of anti-popery often sought to retarget “fears and jealousies” rather than to eliminate them entirely. The Tory dean of Durham, Denis Granville, wrote near the end of James's reign that he had long been horrified by “Caballs to encrease Fears, & Jealousyes.” These cabals had encouraged English subjects to rebel against their lawful lord. Granville believed that “a great number of Roman Catholicks in England have been highly loyall to their King,” unlike the dissenters, “whose principles are Antimonarchicall, and destructive of Kingly Government.” As a consequence, he averred, “my Fears & Jealousyes, runne quite a contrary way to most Men's with whom I converse, i.e, I am more affraid of the Subjects running into Rebellion, then I am of my Princes Exercising Tyranny, and more Jealous, that People, who call themselves sons of the Ch[urch] of England, will, rather than their King, destroy their Religion.”Footnote 38 Granville denounced the widespread fears that the Catholic King James would destroy the Church of England, but he did not condemn fear itself, which could have its place. For him, the proper object of “fears and jealousies” was not Catholicism but rebellion.
The Tory dean of Durham criticized anti-popery on prudential grounds as a source of instability, faction, and caballing. As he warned the clergy of Durham in a speech shortly after William of Orange's invasion of England in November 1688, there was a type of person who had “suck’d in sedition with his milk, [and who] is Antimonarchicall (whiles hee pretends to be Anti-papisticall) in his nature.” Three months earlier he had expressed his forebodings that the government and the Church of England might suffer ill consequences from anti-popish fears: with people “now agitated more than ever by an intemperate zeale against Popery,” many were caught up in “an excessive fear that Popery will come in.”Footnote 39 For Granville, the invasion was the fulfillment of those fears. Shortly after preaching against the invading forces and decrying the influence of the “Anti-papisticall” republicans, the dean departed England for exile in France.
Opposition to anti-popery of the sort expressed by Granville was a rhetorical strategy with a long heritage. It had been a staple of anti-exclusionist rhetoric during the crisis of 1678–81 and of anti-nonconformist rhetoric before then. The centerpiece of this argument was historical in nature, relying for its persuasive power on an analogy between currently existing forms of anti-popery and the forms of anti-popery that had been common in England on the eve of the Civil War. According to this line of reasoning, anti-popish rhetoric had led in the past to rebellion, disloyalty, faction, strife, and the horrid killing of the king; if permitted to propagate itself it might do the same again.Footnote 40 To be a certain kind of high Tory was to oppose exclusion, rebellion, and revolution and to reject explicitly the anti-popish tropes that underpinned these political maneuvers. This form of critique helps to explain the continuity of high Tory, or ultra-loyalist, support for James II, from the successful efforts by Tories to defeat any attempts to exclude the duke of York from the throne, to the willingness of many ultra-loyalists in the 1685 parliament to accept the king's employment of Catholic officers, to their defense of James during the Glorious Revolution, to their tendency to become nonjurors and Jacobites after the Revolution.Footnote 41
Such a man was Thomas Cartwright, dean of Ripon and later bishop of Chester. In the 1670s and early 1680s, he published a series of loyalist sermons that brought him to the attention of the court and led to his elevation to the episcopate by James II in 1686. He supported the religious policies of the king who elevated him, including the suspension of the penal laws against nonconformity and of the Test Acts that barred Catholics from serving in public office. He was friendly with Catholics but hostile to some dissenters. Upon the revolution, he fled to France and then followed James to Ireland, where he contracted dysentery and died in 1689. There was some expectation that he would convert to Catholicism upon his deathbed, but he defied these expectations by remaining an Anglican.Footnote 42 In his published writings during the reign of James II, he excoriated anti-popery as both impolitic and disloyal: “Railing therefore against Popery cannot produce any good Effect, and at this time it may easily produce many bad ones; among which none can be worse, than the Contempt which it will throw upon the King himself, on whom all Ill Language against his Religion, does ultimately redound to the debasing of him in the esteem of his Subjects.”Footnote 43 Cartwright contended that “A Papist may be a Friend to Liberty, and a known Enemy to Persecution,” pointing to the king himself as a prominent example of this. Anti-popery, he argued, “tends not so much to arm the Hearers against Popery, as to possess them with an hatred of their Sovereign for professing it” and was a form of “Sedition under the disguise of Zeal.” The ill effect of “the groundless Jealousies of Popery's coming in” was that it “alarums [sic] the Rabble.” Attacks on Catholics might be expected from “Anabaptists or Presbyterians” but should not be heard from “any True Son of the Church of England,” who must not forget that Roman Catholics “are Englishmen and good Christians.” As he informed the fellows of Magdalen College in 1687, “Our Nation is in greater danger of being destroyed by Prophanness [profaneness], then Popery.”Footnote 44
These proudly loyalist arguments were echoed by Edmund Elys, another Tory cleric who, like Cartwright, refused to endorse the Glorious Revolution and did not take the oaths to William and Mary. Elys's career lacked the meteoric arc of Cartwright’s; he remained the rector of East Allington in Devon until his deprivation after the revolution. In a pair of pamphlets published in 1687, he advocated the repeal of the laws penalizing Catholics on the grounds that they were “Persons very Ingenious, very Well bred” who had proved their loyalty to the king by helping to suppress Monmouth's Rebellion. He exhorted his readers not to “be Affrighted by the Pharisaicall Multitude from Acknowledging All the Truth we find Profest, and all the Virtue we find Practiced by Papists.” He maintained that the Church of Rome was “a True Church” and that all Christians must, therefore, “exercise towards Persons of that Communion, not only Common Charity, but Brotherly Love.” For these reasons Elys urged the members of the Church of England to support the king's campaign against the penal laws.Footnote 45
In opposing anti-popery, the ultra-loyalists were following King James's lead. The king relied heavily on the trope of “fears and jealousies” in defending his religious policies. In a letter to the English archbishops, he gave the rationale for his instructions of 1686 forbidding controversial preaching: he was concerned that some “men of unquiet and Factious Spirits” might preach in such a manner as would stir up “Fears and Jealousies” in their hearers. When John Sharp, dean of Norwich and rector of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, preached an anti-popish sermon in defiance of the new orders, James ordered the bishop of London to ban him from preaching on the grounds that Sharp had insinuated “Fears and Jealousies to dispose them [his audience] to Discontent.”Footnote 46 The bishop refused to comply and was called to account by the newly formed Ecclesiastical Commission, which eventually suspended him. The king's strategy might have worked if the anti-popish preachers had been a few “men of unquiet and Factious Spirits,” as he alleged, but they were in truth a considerable group of the most talented preachers in the Church. They had substantial support among the episcopate and were not easily marginalized. Heavy-handed efforts to restrict their preaching only incensed their supporters. The king persisted, nevertheless, in his campaign to restrict anti-popish preaching, telling the Scottish Privy Council to take “care that there be no Preachers or others suffered to insenuate into the people any feares or jealousies.”Footnote 47
The king also employed less coercive means of persuasion. When he heard that the dean of Peterborough had been accused of preaching on controversial matters, he summoned him to a private audience and told him that he “desired only that fears and jealousies might not be stirred up in people's minds, for they were the beginning of troubles.” He instructed the high court judges sent out on circuit to “remove as much as may be all Fears & Jealousies that are endeavour’d to be insinuated by Persons ill affected to the Governm[en]t.” His agents in Wales were told to “remove as much as may be all feares and jealousies out of the peoples minds by telling them his Majestie only designes the universall happinesse of his people.” The king's charm offensive was strengthened by his suspension of the penal laws. In his Declaration for liberty of conscience, published in 1687, he expressed his hope that “the Freedom and Assurance We have hereby given in relation to Religion and Property, might be sufficient to remove from the Minds of Our Loving Subjects all Fears and Jealousies in relation to either.” He proclaimed his intentions to seek a permanent repeal of the penal laws. The king was aware that his actions were not interpreted charitably by all. He told a group of Presbyterians after they thanked him for his Declaration, “I understand there are some Jealousies among my Subjects, That I have done this in a Designe.”Footnote 48 His enactment of a broad-based and inclusive toleration was seen by many nonconformists as a disingenuous bid to attract their support, but it did have the effect of swinging some nonconformists and Whigs into his camp.
James II's Whig supporters, like his Tory supporters, sought to defend the king's policies by opposing anti-popery. For the king's Tory supporters, opposition to anti-popery was merely a continuation of their prior modes of argument, as they had long associated anti-popery with rebellion. This was not the case, however, for the Whigs. Some of them shifted markedly. Henry Care, one of the most dedicated exponents of anti-popery during the Popish Plot crisis, became a vocal proponent of the king's religious policies in 1687 and 1688. The man who had formerly edited stridently anti-popish serials, the Popish Courant and the Weekly Pacquet of Advice from Rome, founded a newspaper that criticized anti-popery, Publick Occurrences Truly Stated. He switched from being a leading anti-popish polemicist to being a leading voice against anti-popery. In this political volte-face he was accompanied by the dramatist Elkanah Settle, who had penned some of the most vicious anti-popish satires and pamphlets published in Charles II's reign, but then succeeded Care as editor of Publick Occurrences after the latter's death in August 1688.Footnote 49 A similar turn can be seen in the career of the Congregationalist minister Stephen Lobb, who denounced popery in 1682 and later criticized denunciations of popery as he came to champion James's toleration policy.Footnote 50
Whig critiques of anti-popery were similar in form to their Tory counterparts. Both sets of critiques alleged that anti-popery was a mask used to disguise a malevolent agenda. Whereas James II's Tory supporters saw anti-popery as a cover for rebellion, his Whig supporters saw it as a cover for self-interest. Care and Lobb argued that Anglican “persecutors” were seeking to dissuade nonconformists from joining the king's toleration campaign. According to Lobb, these “persecutors” were more afraid of losing their ability to marginalize nonconformists than they were of popery. They had alleged that the king's Declaration for liberty of conscience was a popish design to divide English Protestants before conquering them. This allegation, according to Lobb, was levied against the king not “out of Kindness or Friendship” for nonconformists, “but of Hatred, Mischief, and Design, viz. That since they can no longer turn the Edge of those Penal Laws against you [nonconformists] to your Ruine, they create Fears and Jealousies, to the end that thereby you may become so Useless and Ungrateful [to the king], as to turn the King's Favour into Displeasure.”Footnote 51 The Congregationalist minister thus sought to trump the allegations of a popish design by charging that the allegations were themselves a “design.” According to Lobb, a group of Anglicans were pursuing this design out of a desire to persecute dissenters, an appetite they could not satisfy if the dissenters supported the king's program.
Care argued along similar lines that anti-popish authors were motivated by antipathy to toleration, not antipathy to popery. Their dislike of toleration stemmed from their self-interested desire to monopolize political power. As he wrote in the fifteenth number of his Publick Occurrences:
Nor indeed is this their Apprehension of Popery, more real than their concern for the Illegality of the Declaration [for Liberty of Conscience], yet both conveniently serve the Ends designed: For tho[ugh] it would be much more honest, yet it would not be so decent nor so politick, to say bluntly, “We have got a jolly number of Laws on our sides, whereby we have Engrossed to our own Party, all the Preferments of the Nation, with Power to Crush all other [religious] Perswasions … We have found the sweets hereof for many years, and made the Dissenters of all sorts tremble before us.”
By “a jolly number of Laws,” Care was alluding to the discriminatory acts, including the Corporation Act of 1661 and the Test Act of 1673, that he had enumerated in his Draconica, a published compendium of the penal laws then in force. Those laws, he alleged, had been designed to bar non-Anglicans from public office, so that Anglicans might preserve the “Preferments of the Nation” for themselves.Footnote 52 Anti-popish attacks on King James's Declaration for liberty of conscience were, in Care's view, nothing more than a cover for selfish ambition.
Settle had made a similar argument five years earlier when he had issued, in 1683, a dramatic recantation of his prior views on anti-popery. In his recantation, Settle had argued that anti-popery was an avenue of advancement for ambitious politicians: “tho’ Religion and Property are the pretended Quarrel against the great Pilots above, their real Greivance is that their own hands are not at the Rudder.” His own anti-popish writings, he now claimed, had been motivated more by his “Malevolent spirit of Revenge” than by any true belief in the Popish Plot. The crisis surrounding the supposed plot had been a “False Fear” whipped up by the leading Whigs to gratify “their own Revenge or sinister Interests.” If they had really believed the anti-popish tales they were spinning, they would have abandoned their houses in the vulnerable parishes of the metropole and fled to safety in the American colonies.Footnote 53
These spectacular reversals provoked much jaundiced commentary. In the eyes of skeptical observers, a few propagandists had found better patronage and adjusted their principles accordingly. Thus Anthony Wood charged Care with being “drawn over so far by the R[oman] Cath[olic] party for bread and money sake, and nothing else.”Footnote 54 Similar aspersions were cast upon Settle.Footnote 55 Care referred to the charges as “that stale Witticism, That H[enry] C[are] Writes for Bread.”Footnote 56 He was unwilling to grant that he had changed in any fundamental way. He depicted his disparate political maneuvers as different tactics designed to reach a consistent goal: “Whatever I have heretofore written … was mainly design’d against the Spirit of Persecution, which where-ever it appears, I take for a Badge of Antichristianism.” A sympathetic elegy published after Care's death noted that he “unto Persecutors prov’d a Scourge: This he himself affirm’d to be his Station.”Footnote 57
At the end of his career, Care continued to see a world divided in Manichaean terms between the persecutors and the tolerant. His earlier anti-popish arguments had been based on the assumption that papists were persecutors. Once Care was persuaded that this assumption was not always correct, he refocused his critiques purely on persecution. He became willing to admit “that there are many worthy Gentlemen and Lords, that are Roman Catholics in the Land; and as they are English Subjects, they have English Hearts.”Footnote 58 His new goal was not to exclude Catholics from public life, but rather to assist in promoting a nation-wide pact whereby “all Parties may be secured from Fears and Jealousies.” The way to accomplish this was, in his view, for parliament to enact a law declaring “that Liberty of Conscience is part of the Constitution of this Kingdom; The natural Birth-right of every English Man.” Passage of this act would remove from any group the power to persecute any other, and hence persecution would wither away, as the “persecuting principle” was replaced by tolerance. Since the king also wished to pass such a law, the king was his ally.Footnote 59
Opposition to persecution could serve as a solvent of anti-popery among nonconformists as many of them came to embrace King James as their ally against the “persecutors.” The Quaker George Whitehead had an audience with James in 1687, during which he discussed the king's recent proclamation of religious toleration. Whitehead told the king that, although many people had feared his accession, his behavior since then had “convinced many of their Mistake therein, and given them Cause to lay aside their former Fears and Jealousies of that Kind.” The Quaker William Shewen drew a clear distinction between the king, who was tolerant, and other Catholics who might not be tolerant, contending that the king, though he practiced the Catholic “manner of worship,” had rejected “the worst parts” of Catholicism, which were “force, violence and persecution.”Footnote 60 William Penn argued that fears of popery before the king's accession had been based on misguided “Apprehentions that they [the Papists] strove for all at our Cost,” but that the king's offer of a permanent and unalterable religious toleration had “secur’d [us] against such Jealousies.”Footnote 61
William Popple, a friend of Penn's and the eventual translator of Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration, agreed that the “tru[e] Ground of the Matter” was not popery but persecution. Popple neatly deployed an anti-persecution frame of reference to counter an anti-popish frame, arguing that laws should be erected that would prevent “Persecuting Papists,” along with all persecuting Protestants, from holding public office in England, while those Catholics and Protestants who had “a Spirit of Moderation and Charity” would be permitted to enter into public office.Footnote 62 This sort of reframing was a key maneuver in critiques of anti-popery. If persecution was the main problem with popery, and not all Catholics were persecutors, then it was the persecutors rather than the Catholics who should be sanctioned.
II
It remains an open question how much popular attitudes shifted as a result of these writings against anti-popery. The Glorious Revolution did not lack for “fears and jealousies.” Anti-popery proved to be highly resilient in the face of criticism, and the weeks after William of Orange's descent on England saw episodes of anti-popish rioting across the country. As one of the critics of anti-popery had ruefully put it, recognizing the daunting nature of the task at hand, “Mens heads are much easilier [sic] laden with, then unladen of suspicions.”Footnote 63 This kind of pessimism was a leitmotif of anti-anti-popish rhetoric. The editor of the London Gazette, Robert Yard, had expressed a similar sentiment over a decade before: “It is hardly credible how strangely jealous people are of popery, and doubtless without any reason, but yet it will be no easy thing to convince them of their mistake.”Footnote 64 Critics of anti-popery were the first to note the strength and persistence of the phenomenon they were combating. But the evident durability of anti-popery does not mean that the opposition it attracted was insignificant. Critiques of anti-popery did possess a degree of popular influence in later Stuart England.
This can be deduced from the evidence of the published critiques themselves. Many announced their opposition to anti-popery in the title, suggesting that this theme was considered a way of attracting readers.Footnote 65 Some went through multiple editions.Footnote 66 The number and variety of these pamphlets suggest a market for this sort of writing. Not all of the tracts critical of anti-popery were lengthy treatises; some were briefer works that would have been suitable for coffeehouse reading.Footnote 67 One example of this genre is a brief dramatic dialogue between two Anglicans, one named William and the other Francis. In this pamphlet, William takes the anti-popish position and Francis criticizes it. Over the course of the dialogue, Francis gradually persuades William to reject anti-popery and to abandon his misguided, hasty “Fears and Jealousies.”Footnote 68 This short, pithy, anonymous pamphlet with its undisguised agenda appears to have been intended as propaganda for a popular audience. Printed propaganda could penetrate to a popular level in this period given increasing levels of literacy, especially in London, and the practice of reading pamphlets aloud in coffeehouses. Twenty thousand copies of the anti-anti-popish tract Parliamentum Pacificum were ordered up by James to be distributed around the country at his own expense in the spring of 1688.Footnote 69 Opposition to anti-popery was proclaimed from pulpits in Cambridgeshire, Worcestershire, and Yorkshire, reaching a popular audience among the hearers. The political and theological debates regarding anti-popery were not conducted solely within the elite; they were also directed at a wider audience.Footnote 70
The circulation of these pamphlets demonstrates the diffusion of these ideas, but it need not indicate their acceptance. The consumers of popular propaganda were not passive. It may be that pamphlets criticizing anti-popery created a stir precisely because the ideas contained within them were considered to be abhorrent. Many observers at the time, however, drew the opposite conclusion, worrying that critiques of anti-popery might be widely credited. The future bishop Richard Kidder wrote of his dismay upon finding that, in Norwich during the reign of James II, “It was given out (I wish I could not say from the pulpit) that there was no danger of Popery; That we had a Prince that never brake his word; That those men ought to be watched who did either speak or insinuate that we were in danger of Popery.” Kidder argued that this Tory Anglican opposition to anti-popery was dangerous. It stemmed, he alleged from “a certain sort of very hot men in the city that were drunk or mad with Loyalty,” and it served to “make way for the entrance of the popish Religion.”Footnote 71 A similar argument was made by an unidentified correspondent who, after reading the critique of anti-popery published by Edmund Elys, wrote to him and charged him with having been “carryed in the stream of secular Interest” and desiring that “our Church [of England] should fall.” Another author described Penn's critique of anti-popery as “Sophistry” and accused him of writing on behalf of popery as part of a secret deal struck when he was granted the proprietorship of Pennsylvania by Charles II.Footnote 72 Penn and Care were both accused of being Jesuits in disguise, and Care's newspaper was described as a “jesuites Pisse pot thrown by Henry Care in the church of England men's faces.”Footnote 73 It seems likely that these responses to Elys, Care, and Penn were so vehement precisely because of concerns that their opposition to anti-popery could gain a broad purchase among the public.
Indeed, there is substantial evidence that men who did not make their living from writing or preaching were taking up the language of opposition to anti-popery. Several addresses sent to the king in 1687 and 1688 thanking him for his Declaration for liberty of conscience referred to it as the edict that took all “fears and jealousies” away. Residents of Northamptonshire wrote that the king's declaration left no “room … for fears and jealousies in any [persons].” A group of dissenting merchants and tradesmen of London wrote that James's edict of toleration had banished “all Fears and Jealousies” from the “Hearts” of his subjects. The Painter-Stainers’ Company of London informed the king that the “long Experience of your Majesties Justice and Goodness hath been a sufficient security against the least Jealousie.” The corporation of Portsmouth advised the king that his declaration of toleration had “dispersed all the Fears and Apprehensions of Fire and Fagot, under Your Majesties Reign, which the wicked Enemies of Your Sacred Person and Religion, had maliciously distilled into the Minds of too many of Your credulous Subjects.”Footnote 74 The corporation of Portsmouth, unlike many other English corporations at this time, was not regulated or reformed by the king, and the authors of this statement were its usual borough officials. The evidence of these addresses suggests that critiques of anti-popery had reached a wide audience by 1687 and had modified the rhetorical practices of some segments of the populace.
III
With the accession of William and Mary, the polemical battles between anti-popery and anti-anti-popery largely abated. There could no longer be any real fear that anti-popery would bring with it a new civil war in England because the position of anti-popery in public life had changed. Anti-popery was an animating force underlying the revolution settlement, as the Bill of Rights forbade any Catholic, or anyone married to a Catholic, from holding the English throne. Anti-popery was less of a menace to English stability now that it had become a pillar of the constitutional settlement. As a consequence, fewer Englishmen and Englishwomen were alarmed by its power and influence. Anti-popery in fact proved to be a powerful integrative agent in Britain and in North America, bringing together Anglicans, Scottish Presbyterians, and New England Congregationalists under the banner of a common opposition to popery and French power.Footnote 75
Opposition to anti-popery, as a consequence, became a more isolated phenomenon, articulated mainly by Jacobites, those English, Scottish and Irish citizens who continued to offer their allegiance to the exiled King James and his heirs. The role of anti-anti-popery in Jacobite polemic was far different than it had been in loyalist polemic during the Restoration period, for it was now deployed not to defend the English government, but rather to critique it. Denis Granville, from his exile in France, returned to his former themes with relish. He attributed the revolution that had overthrown James to anti-popery combined with Francophobia: “The English were Overwhelmed with Jealousies of introducing Popery & promoting the Int[e]rest of France.” He suggested that those fears of popery had been groundless: he himself had long thought the English nation to be “nearer a Rebellion, than the Introducing of Popery.” Recent events, he contended, had proved that he had been right to fear rebellion. In seeking to free themselves from popery by overthrowing a Catholic king, Englishmen had only made themselves vulnerable to “Tyranny & Presbitery.”Footnote 76 All of his warnings, he believed, were coming true.
Not all of the critics of anti-popery after the revolution were simply repeating their former prophecies in a new situation. The pamphlets of the Scottish radical Robert Ferguson underwent a more extensive transformation. Over the course of the 1680s, he had published a series of anti-popish pamphlets while participating actively in both Monmouth's invasion of 1685 and William's of 1688.Footnote 77 After the revolution he became disillusioned with William's government and turned Jacobite. He became as fierce a critic of anti-popery as he had been its advocate, publishing in 1695 the anti-anti-popish pamphlet Whether the Preserving the Protestant Religion was the Motive Unto, or the End, that was Designed in the Late Revolution? Whereas before the revolution, he had depicted Catholics as untrustworthy, bigoted, and threatening, he now had nothing but kind words for them: “We ought to own and respect them as Christians, and to pay them the deference that is due unto them, not only upon the score of the Condition and Quality of many of them, but upon the account both of their moral Accomplishments and of their natural and acquired Parts, in which great Numbers of them are remarkably Eminent.” Ferguson criticized the anti-popish arguments that had fueled the revolution, describing them as “those noisy and clamorous Suggestions, which were so industriously spread.” These “fictions of Knaves to impose upon Fools” had been designed “to mislead a credulous and unthinking People.” In fact there had never been anything for Protestants to fear from Catholics because England never could have been Catholicized, either by persuasion or by force. Catholic efforts at proselytizing under James II had proved a dismal failure, the English Catholics were outnumbered by Protestants a hundred to one, and the English army had remained largely Protestant throughout the king's reign. Despite the weaknesses of English Catholicism, James had been unable, according to Ferguson, to persuade the English to abandon their “Jealousies and Fears of his harbouring Intentions against our Religion.” The reason for this was that many English Protestants were “People of very weak and shallow Understandings” whose “Zeal is much greater than their Knowledge.” They had been too eager to listen to “a few Demagogues” who had been “bribed by the Prince of Orange.”Footnote 78 Ferguson neglected to mention that he had been one of those demagogues himself.
The Scottish polemicist had an opportunistic approach to anti-popery, using it or critiquing it depending on what served his purposes best. His shifting polemical strategy was seen again in his next series of rhetorical moves. In his 1706 History of the Revolution, he initially repeated his critique of revolutionary anti-popery, arguing that “it was not in King James's Power to introduce Popery,” but that “Fears and Jealousies” of popery had nevertheless “drowned our Reason.” He then added a startling claim, which was that the pope had covertly engaged William to invade England in order to undermine the Church of England. In return for the support of the pope and other Catholics, Ferguson alleged, the prince of Orange had converted secretly to Catholicism. After his accession, William had worked to fracture the Church of England from within by promoting toleration in England.Footnote 79 Thus the Glorious Revolution, in this fanciful retelling, was itself a kind of popish plot. Over the course of two decades, Ferguson had gone from espousing anti-popish arguments against James, to critiquing those same arguments, to redeploying them as a critique of the revolution. Anti-popery was not an indelible aspect of Ferguson's outlook; rather, it was a polemical tool to be used and abandoned.
IV
Both anti-popery and anti-anti-popery were conspiracy theories. The two theories had similar structural features: the identification of a malevolent force that was plotting to disrupt the state; a series of alarmist claims about the activities of the plotters, who were said to be disguising their true motives; and the assignment of a key role in fighting the plot to a perceptive narrator who could expose the hidden agenda underlying these deceptive pretenses. Titus Oates's self-assigned role in unraveling popish plots in the late 1670s was paralleled by Henry Care's self-assigned role in unraveling anti-popish plots in the late 1680s.Footnote 80 The goal of these conspiracy theories was to identify an “other” against whom a political movement could rally itself.
Conspiracy theories often have a double-edged power, able to serve as both disruptive and productive forces. Anti-popery was seen as a divisive force by many English Protestants in the decades before the Glorious Revolution. But, as has already been observed, it was also a powerful integrative force that served to knit together the eighteenth-century British empire. Anti-anti-popery, likewise, could be both a divisive and an integrative force. It was used by Jacobites to sow divisions in England in the 1690s. But it is also possible to imagine a British empire that could have rallied around the broader toleration championed by James II, one that would have reintegrated Catholics and nonconformists into the political system on an equal basis with Anglicans. Such a vision, underpinned by critiques of anti-popery, would have had profound effects in Ireland, which was, for obvious reasons, never integrated adequately into the anti-popish ascendancy of the eighteenth century. It is no surprise to find that the political economist Sir William Petty, always a proponent of Anglo-Irish integration, was also a critic of anti-popery.Footnote 81 The exclusion of Catholics from British political life in 1689 had its costs as well as its benefits, and anti-popery was not the only possible way of consolidating an expanding British empire.
There is no question that opposition to anti-popery could benefit Catholics, and it is hardly surprising that English Catholics would criticize anti-popery. But opposition to anti-popery could also benefit Protestants, by underpinning a broad toleration that would encompass all major Christian groups in the British Isles. It was not necessary to be sympathetic to Catholic doctrines to be disturbed by the disruptive power of anti-popery, especially when anti-popish ideas were being used to target the monarch, as in the reign of James II. England's political troubles in the Restoration period had more than one persuasive diagnosis; those crises could be blamed either on popery or on anti-popery. The diversity of these diagnoses helps to explain the political fracturing that bedeviled Restoration England.
